With Tommy Franks back in the top job, Admiral Ritchie found that many of the political calls he’d recently had to make could be passed up the line to his superior – a situation for which he was entirely grateful. He had even managed to get home for more than four hours and have a meal with Amanda this week, after which they’d spoken on the phone with Nancy, their daughter, for a few short but precious minutes. She was staying with a couple of college friends in Edinburgh, sharing an apartment rather than braving one of the American refugee camps in the south of England. It was a blessed relief to hear her voice again. It meant that he could set aside personal worries and concentrate on his much greater professional ones.
Ritchie had his hands full coordinating refugee flows throughout the Pacific, while standing watch over the strategic situation in Asia – a fancy way of saying he was holding his breath and watching the collapse of China and the north-east Asian economies, hoping it wouldn’t spill over into the wider world. His ability to do anything about it was disappearing fast. He simply couldn’t sustain the Pacific Fleet for much longer, even with the help of allies such as Japan, who were themselves teetering on the brink of collapse.
But Tusk Musso’s gambit had dragged him right back into the centre of a purely political question. Would he be party to authorising a strategic interdiction? Damn the euphemisms, call it what it was: a nuclear attack.
He stood opposite Franks in the Joint Operations Centre for the whole of the Pacific Command as they listened to the last of Musso’s briefing on speaker-phone. The room was a large space, but old-fashioned. It had been due to be replaced in a few months with a much larger, modern facility. Maybe it would happen, probably not though. For now, both men leaned forward to listen to their colleague as his disembodied voice crackled out of an old speaker-phone.
‘I really don’t think we can let them put ten thousand hostages in the bag,’ said the Marine. ‘They’ll turn the civilians into human shields, for certain. We either show them they can’t fuck with us, right now, or I promise you they will. After Gitmo, it’ll be the Canal. And they won’t even have to land there. They can just start executing hostages on the hour until we leave. You know they’ll do it.’
Ritchie found himself agreeing, but he waited for Franks to speak. The soldier’s melancholy features seemed even more hangdog than usual, which was saying something. The new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had returned from the Middle East with enormous dark pouches under his eyes, and cheeks hollowed out by the stress. A flap of skin hung loose beneath his chin where he had lost a lot of weight.
‘General, I do not know whether our submarines will even respond to an order to fire on Venezuela,’ Franks replied. ‘Only the President can authorise a launch. What d’you think, Jim?’ he asked, turning to Ritchie.
The admiral shook his head. ‘Right back at the start of this, I had the devil’s own job getting my boomers to break protocol when I needed China boxed in. I didn’t know whether they’d have launched on my say-so even if I had ordered them. I still don’t. Only the President of the United States can authorise the use of nuclear weapons. The commanders in charge of those assets are trained not to respond to any other command authority’
‘There’s only one way to find out,’ said Musso.
He found Salas back in his office, arms folded, glaring out of the jagged hole where a window had been just yesterday. George Stavros had remained seated and was watching the Venezuelans with mute hostility. He relaxed only slightly when Musso returned from the radio shack.
‘I could just order my men to take this building, you know,’ said General Salas, keeping his back to them. ‘You could not hold it long, General Musso. I can see that from here. Perhaps that might be a better idea than allowing you to run off every few minutes to consult with your superiors, no?’ he finished, turning to face Tusk at last.
It was very poor acting, thought Musso. He’d seen much better dramatics at law school during moot season. ‘No, General,’ he answered. ‘That would not be a very good idea. You’re here under a flag of truce, to negotiate a surrender on acceptable terms. Perhaps if you faced up to your responsibilities as an officer and started behaving like a professional warrior rather than a gang lord, we might get somewhere.’
The Venezuelan’s neck flushed noticeably, but his face froze in a cold fury. He sat himself very carefully down behind the damaged desk again.
‘Have you spoken to Caracas?’ asked Musso, all but ignoring the gross umbrage taken by Salas at his remark.
‘Si,’ the General said, deciding in the end not to respond to the insult. ‘I am authorised to offer safe passage to all Americans in Cuba. We, in turn, will accept custodianship of the unaffected region of Cuba until the Cuban Government reasserts itself.’
Musso snorted. ‘We want more than just safe passage out of Cuban waters. It wouldn’t do to have one of your submarines taking pot shots at us as we try to sail out of the neighbourhood. We want a guarantee of safe passage out of the Caribbean and Atlantic as well.’
Salas narrowed his eyes. His lips turned white and his nostrils flared again. ‘You are pushing your luck, General Musso,’ he said with a tightly clenched jaw.
‘No,’ Musso corrected him. ‘You are pushing yours.’
‘Tell the President that it is not a bluff, Mr Shapiro,’ said Franks. ‘Tell him we are deadly serious. The rules have changed. Hell, there are no rules anymore – not when he feels free to fire on our civilians whenever it suits him… I don’t give a damn that they deny it. That’s one of the things that’s changed: I don’t have to give a damn anymore. Just tell him.’
Ritchie stood quietly in the underground command centre, listening to Franks as he talked on the phone to the American Ambassador in Venezuela. Now, there’s a job I’m glad I didn’t get stuck with, he thought.
Many of the screens in the room were blank, the workstations unmanned. Just behind Franks, a navy commander silently updated the positions of three Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarines in the south Atlantic, moving their pins on an old-fashioned paper map. All three were well within striking distance of Caracas. One of them, the Tennessee, had only just responded to flash traffic, having been silent since 14 March. There were two other boomers lurking somewhere in the Atlantic right then as well, but they had flatly refused Franks’s request to put some bite into Musso’s bluff, citing the launch protocol, line and verse. Only the President of the United States, using the correct and verified launch codes…
It didn’t matter. They really only needed the ordnance of one Ohio-class submarine.
Franks appeared to be listening to some long and winding passage of dialogue from Ambassador Shapiro but then cut him off. ‘Look. I can see this is getting us nowhere, Mr Ambassador. Can I suggest you take cover, sir? Franks out.’ He hung up and turned to Ritchie. ‘Do it.’
The admiral picked up a phone. He had expected his voice to sound shaky but it was remarkably steady. ‘This is Ritchie,’ he said. ‘Patch me through to the Tennessee.’
General Alano Salas nodded and hung up his phone. ‘It is not acceptable,’ he told Musso. ‘You impugn our honour with the very suggestion. To promise that we will not attack you as you flee, to imply that we would even consider such a thing, is to traduce our national reputation. Our very manhood.’
Musso would have snorted in derision but he was haunted by the awful sight of that C-5 spilling its precious human cargo into the night. So many children, hundreds of them. Their deaths had been confirmed by the light of dawn. It was a sight so gruesome he would never be free of it. What terror must have attended their last moments on earth? If he had been wearing a side-arm, the general’s brains would probably be dripping down the wall behind him right now.
‘Do not talk to me of your honour,’ he said, slowly and carefully enunciating each word. ‘I have seen your honour and it is a poor ragged fucking thing, which barely hides the crude ugliness of your intentions and deeds. The lowest of my Marines could not wipe his ass clean with your honour, General Salas. It would not be worth the effort of the rubbing. Now, I suggest you stop fucking everyone around and agree to what is a very reasonable request.’ Musso looked at his watch. ‘Time is running out.’
Salas regarded him with lidded eyes, a snake sizing up a scorpion for its dinner, weighing up the risks. ‘And how long do you imagine that the civilians we are holding, some four thousand of them, I believe, how long do you think they will survive in any… cross-fire?’
Musso sneered openly. ‘Those people are in your care, General,’ he replied, ‘and I would warn you to have a care for their safety. You, and every man under your command, will be held personally responsible for their fate. You keep telling me that things have changed, and you are right. There will be no diplomatic solution to this question, no Security Council meetings, no backroom deals – if you hurt them you will be hunted down. Your men will be hunted down. And your country will be laid to waste.’
‘I think you overestimate yourself, General Musso. You are not the power you once were.’
‘No. We’re not,’ said Musso. ‘We’re something infinitely worse now.’
‘Active track, package inbound,’ a staff officer announced. ‘One minute to impact.’
Ritchie watched the centre-left screen, which showed a view of Caracas from the roof of the American Embassy. The Venezuelan capital sat high up in a valley of the Cordillera de la Costa Central, separated from the shores of the Caribbean by a ten- to twelve-mile stretch of national park. On a linked display, the ocean could be seen in a wide-angle shot sourced from the international airport, which lay on the water’s edge in the smaller city of Maiquetia, a short distance away. The image looked benign, a pleasant scene of blue water and a few plodding boats. Ritchie wondered if there were people down by the water, taking in the fresh air. He didn’t recall Caracas being famous for any beaches. The embassy had reported that the streets of the capital were not overly crowded, although there was a heavy and obvious military presence. But there was none of the violence and chaos that was rampant throughout so much of South America, or Europe for that matter.
Nobody in the command centre spoke. Ritchie could hear the blood rushing through his own head. It seemed perverse that he had just unleashed a nuclear warhead. It could not be real.
At 0706 hours a second sunrise blossomed over Maiquetia. On the satellite feed, three bright flashes, one at a time, flared up, twenty miles offshore.
‘All weapons delivered, Admiral.’
The Venezuelan general looked ill as he put down the phone.
‘S-s-afe passage out of the region is… assured, General Musso,’ he said. ‘But this isn’t over. My government assures me that this isn’t over.’
‘It’d better be over,’ Musso replied, rising from his seat. ‘The next time it won’t be warning shots. Good day.’